Genre
JANE PETERSON (1876–1965)
Picnic at the Beach, about 1915
Oil on canvas, 18 x 24 in.
Signed (at lower right): JANE PETERSON
EX COLL.: [Robert Schoelkopf Gallery, New York]; Betty Brown Casey, Potomac, Maryland until 2022; to her estate, 2022 until the present
Picnic at the Beach is most likely a Gloucester scene. Gloucester, originally a fishing town on Cape Ann, some forty miles north of Boston, was settled in the earliest days of the Massachusetts Bay colony, The town boasts its own native son artist, Fitz Henry Lane (1804–1865). Picnic at the Beach belongs to a genre beloved by impressionist painters—depictions of people enjoying leisure activity away from the stresses of everyday life. Between 1914 and 1924, Peterson found inspiration in New England locales, destinations that became compellingly attractive in the years of World War I, when Peterson’s accustomed fishing villages of Holland, Belgium, England, and Brittany were inaccessible. These offered a patriotic equivalent, made all the more attractive by easy transportation from New York and Boston. Although there is, at present, no precise chronology of Peterson’s travels, she exhibited New England views as early as 1915 and regularly thereafter. In choosing Gloucester, Peterson followed a well-trod path, following past and present American artists including Winslow Homer, William Morris Hunt, Childe Hassam, Willard Metcalf, Edward Potthast, John Twachtman, Edward Hopper, John Sloan, Stuart Davis, and Maurice Prendergast.
